Prize Comics #1 - pt. 5

I haven't tackled a five-parter in a long time, but I had a lot to say about this issue.

We're going to pick up not long after where I left off with K the Unknown and we will, as usual, discuss it in terms of RPG game mechanics. As anyone who's ever read a previous post knows, I wrote the RPG Hideouts & Hoodlums and feel it does a spectacular job of  emulating the early history of comic books -- which I prove post after post on this blog.

And yet...K, getting stunned on the first hit by a thrown paperweight just doesn't match up with the hit point model of incremental defeat that H&H uses. It seems more like every hit has a random chance of delivering a stun. And, as I think about it, I see this all the time against bad guys and animals; only Heroes are usually incrementally defeated. And it does give me pause.

This page also highlights the importance of checking every mobster you defeat for disguises.

I'll give K this, the finale is worthy of a James Bond movie, with the hero and villain struggling upright on a speeding bobsled -- in fact, it predates the bobsled chase in On Her Majesty's Secret Service by 23 years!

I would think that two men grappling on a moving bobsled would wind up getting thrown off almost immediately, but in-game would be fine with giving each a save vs. science each turn to stay put, with a penalty to their save on the hairpin curve.

If Buck Brady of the F.B.I. seems science fictional, it's because of the absence of 1,000-dollar bills out there today. The U.S. government stopped making the bills by 1946, and finally recalled them all in 1969, so I've never seen one in my life.

I decided to share this page to talk about players choosing the direction of the scenario, because I read this I couldn't help but think, if this was a game I was playing, I would have had Buck follow the car rather than search her room. Now, if I was the Editor instead, I could leave a clue in the room telling the player where the old lady was going, and hopefully the player will get the hint that it's important to go to that location...

In this case, the Editor seems to have decided to move the planned encounter back to the hotel room. On one hand, it makes the villain seem smarter, guessing Buck was coming, but on the other hand it makes the Editor seem like he's unfairly using his knowledge of the player's actions against them. A way around that might be to let the player attempt to save vs. plot to find the hotel room abandoned.

Here is the oddly-already-a-cliche of the man dressed as an old woman, but with the switcheroo that the Hero then uses the same disguise.

I'm impressed by the daring involved in piloting your boat into a police boat just to get their attention. A mean Editor could well give you a chance of sinking the police boat, and then where will you be?

The final story we're going to look at is Storm Curtis of the U.S. Coast Guard. I'm showing you this page for two reasons: one, it's more fun playing a character with interests other than crime-fighting 24/7. Give your Hero a hobby, either one you already know about, or one you're willing to research.

And two, check out that grappling hook gun! This is much closer to what a real grapple gun looks like than what Batman has carried since the 1980s, though I'm not convinced grapple guns were that small and handheld in 1940; there could still be some artistic license at play here.

Paper and pencils are good things to find on a defeated mobster, as are cigarettes.

Note the use of "espy" in panel 2, a word I don't think was even in common usage then!

Those are really convenient clues to find in someone's pocket!

Personally, I find the chief spy encounter anticlimactic, but it's certainly surprising and good to pull on your players once.

I think it's amusing how Curtis sort of bumbled into this whole spy ring, like a player getting a lot of railroading help from his Editor.

Comics.org doesn't say who the artist is here, but I suspect Dick Briefer. What do you think?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Popular Comics #48 - pt. 3

The sports genre doesn't get a lot of attention on this blog, and Wally Williams gets even less (in fact, debuting here on the blog), but this story deserves special attention. Instead of the college kids fending for themselves, they unrealistically approach Wally's grandpa and ask him for help.

How old is Gramps? Gramps claims to have worked with Mark Twain, which may sound off, but Samuel Clemens died in 1910. Someone who was 18 in 1910 would be only 48 now in 1940. This bears in keeping in mind, when considering who your Heroes might have known in their backstories...

And Gramps actually has some good ideas. This underground newspaper is a sort of pre-Internet crowdsourcing for crime prevention.

I'm not sure if $10 is a reasonable rental price for a wagon and two horses in 1940, but it is for at least this old geezer.

This page raises other questions. Can a pea shooter/slingshot launch a dart? How great an effect would a small dose of carbolic acid have on an elephant?  If a person drank carbolic acid, it would cause acute gastroenteritis (inflammation of the stomach and intestines), leading to vomiting, collapse and death -- but only on a failed saving throw.

This is where game mechanics surrounding poison kind of break down in the game. The effects described always assume human mass; not only should increased Hit Dice allow mobsters to shake off the effects of poison, but should lessen the effect of poison when it does take effect. But how to adjudicate that?

I share this page so we could talk about movement rates. Can a charging elephant really overtake horses pulling a wagon? There are a lot of unknowns here, like how much weight the wagon is loaded down with, but generally speaking - an elephant runs up to 16-25 MPH. How this translates into movement rate is that an elephant would have a Move of 21, but with a skill check can manage a burst of speed that raises it to 24 (both for convenience and because of precedent, movement rates are rounded off to the nearest divisible of 3).

A horse can run up to 30 MPH; if we assume that the wagon halves their movement, that brings us down to 15. So, yes, even if the horses make their skill checks and the elephant fails its check, the elephant would still win. Of course, if the wagon was very light, this might not be the case.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Adventure Comics #42

The adventures of The Sandman continue, and he's got to have one of the best fleshed-out, yet little-known, backstories in all of early comic book history. Here, we learn that Wesley Dodds was in the U.S. Navy Air Corps as of 1933. We also get backstory SCMs for Wes -- Dr. Clyde Dunlap and "Happy" O'Shea. Supporting Cast Members can be assigned like that by the Editor as a story demands, though players should be discouraged from just "saying" they have old friends they can call on for help.

In this case, Clyde and Happy even know about Wes being The Sandman. It does not seem to be implied that the Sandman identity extends back to '33, so they likely learned about it from him sometime since then.

Wes, Clyde, and Happy all have access to fighter planes. Wes is a billionaire in his backstory, but has likely not had time to accumulate the $20,000+ he would need to purchase a fighter plane in game play. This has to be another hand-out from the Editor for this scenario.

The scenario has the three good guy fighter planes up against four bad guy biplanes. The good guys start out with the advantage of surprise and use the aviation stunt Out of the Sun against them. They immediately fail their primary objective, though, to protect an eighth plane in the air full of innocent passengers. Luckily, the passenger plane has more hit points because it only goes down from complications, while the biplanes are weaker and crash violently instead.

Hideouts & Hoodlums will, eventually, be able to play out a scenario just like that.

Wes has a gas bomb -- different from his gas gun -- that he uses for the only time in this story.

In Barry O'Neil's adventure, he uses not one but three aviator stunts -- Wing Walking, Deadstick, and Improvised Landing.

Then Barry picks up a crate and hits two thugs with it at once -- not possible by the H&H rules, unless these are actually weaker hoodlums instead of 2 HD thugs.

Barry passes up the chance to search Krull's ship for loot by blowing it up with mines first. The scenario kind of demanded it, since other ships were in jeopardy, but Barry's player might be ticked off about that.

Socko Strong meets an ape-man (that's getting a stat entry in 2nd ed.) and sails to its lost world island. The lost world seems, for some reason, limited to a valley on the island that you have to climb a cliff and cross a fallen tree over a gorge to get to. The valley is somehow big enough to support both a tyrannosaurus rex and a stegosaurus with food. Both of these dinosaurs will likely be left out of the basic book, for being just too big and dangerous.

Captain Desmo and Gabby are up against cultists (also getting an entry in 2nd ed.). probably with thugs and assassins (another 2nd ed. add) mixed in. The bad guys have a simple deathtrap for Gabby, tossing him into a pit full of cobras.

Anchors Aweigh puts Don and Red in an unusual situation; they find themselves in an unbeatable scenario, if the scenario is wrongly interpreted as a "save the ship" scenario. The torpedo is too close to the ship for them to do anything about, so this is a survival scenario -- at least initially.

Don and Red meet Admiral Cato, our first bonafide Napoleon character (we've seen some mad scientists so far with Napoleon complexes, but they all fit the mad scientist mold better). From the summary I have to read, I don't know what all of Cato's weapons are, but some of them appear to be poison gas bombs.

Don and Red can't figure a way out of this underwater lair they are trapped in, so they come up with a rather clever plan. After sabotaging the oxygen supply for the hideout, Cato's henchmen fail their morale saves and offer to come up with a way out of the hideout for them.

Sometimes the bigger picture of world war is just going to be backdrop for your H&H stories. The Skip Schuyler story takes place in a Chinese city just as it's being bombed by the Japanese -- but the story doesn't really have anything to do with that. The scenario starts when Skip rescues a boy who serves as the plot hook to uncover the kidnapping of an American reporter. The reporter has a guard guarding her (guards were statted in the first H&H module and will be in 2nd ed. too).

Rusty, of Rusty and His Pals, is menaced by yellow peril hoodlums serving a Fu Manchu villain. Fu Manchu is guarded by guards, but Steve -- Rusty's adult pal -- shows up, makes his save vs. plot, and is able to ignore the guards and go straight after the Fu Manchu villain, Chen Fu. Steve still loses, though, and is placed in a complex deathtrap. He's tied on a plank over a pit full of metal spikes, with a pendulum blade swinging down at him from above (I presume Steve is under the plank and the pendulum  blade is to cut the rope and drop him in the pit, though the trap seems like it would work just as well if Steve was on top of the plank and the blade is coming down to cut him).

Cotton Carver has to rescue his friends when they are kidnapped by cultists and taken to be sacrificed. Cotton tracks them through a forest and starts shooting the cultists, but his friends still get dumped into a pit with water in the bottom. He dives in and they all get sucked by an undertow into a subterranean cavern that opens to the sky (? -- hollow world settings confuse me). The "god" of the cultists is a brontosaurus. Like the earlier dinosaurs mentioned, this is way too big and dangerous for the basic book. And yet...Cotton somehow kills it by catching it in a grass fire. Infused with massive amounts of experience points, Cotton and his friends enter a kingdom defended by medieval-esque knights. Do knights need to be their own mobster type?

(Sandman story read in Golden Age Sandman Archives, summaries of the rest read at DC Wikia.)

Funny Pages #9

I don't have much to talk about from this issue, which is just as well given the quality of the scans I have to work from.

I haven't included much of anything from the early Clock stories yet; George Brenner's art was so stiff that most of his characters just stood around and talked. But here he tries his first action page with a dive and rescue scenario.

Hideouts & Hoodlums doesn't have rules for things like holding your breath, buoyancy, or swimming in general.  Using 1-minute turns makes it very hard to talk about holding your breath in any game mechanic sense. Basically, any Hero diving has just 1 turn in which to act before needing to surface -- unless protected by spell, power, or trophy item.

Comic book characters, originally, often didn't start with any back story, but leaped straight into action.  With superheroes, you often needed some explanation of how they got that way, but even then it could often be summarized in a single page.

One way to give a character back story, without needing a lengthy explanation, is to make it a mystery -- like how Jerry Frost here was found as an abandoned infant with a mystery locket, and odd facts about the boat he was found in. These facts could have come from the Editor, or maybe the player.  Neither even has to know the meanings behind them yet, leaving it for the other one to explain during game play, or to work on together as a puzzle.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)